


an art lawful as eating

by village_skeptic



Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Adolescence, Alternate Universe - Magical Realism, Childhood, Eventual Romance, F/M, Gen, Prequel, Riverdale: the town with PEP!, also the town with structural inequality & questionable parenting & also magic I guess
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-07-11
Updated: 2017-08-03
Packaged: 2018-11-30 18:47:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11469513
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/village_skeptic/pseuds/village_skeptic
Summary: Love is friendship caught fire, and so this story is about friendship, love, and - well, things catching on fire.--A Riverdale magical realism prequel-ish AU, focused mostly (but not entirely) on Betty and Jughead, both separately and together. Three parts planned.





	1. Chapter 1

Our story is about a town – a small town, and the people who live in the town. From a distance, it presents itself like so many other small towns all over the world --

Well. Okay.

Maybe if you looked from a really, really _far_ distance.

The truth was that there had always been whispers about Riverdale – yes, the town, and the people who lived in the town, and the people who left the town for greener (or at least more mundane) pastures. For the better part of the last hundred years, Riverdale had billed itself as “the town with PEP!”

And “pep” was a nice word for it, but if you wanted to dispense with all the euphemisms and get right down to brass tacks, Riverdale was really the town with magic.

 

 

Not _Harry Potter_ magic, you understand, or like anything out of those scary movies they show late at night on the pay channels. No one was zooming around on broomsticks with wands yelling Latin incantations at each other, or sacrificing animals in pentagrams to summon the devil. Certainly there was some dancing around bonfires that went on – but there was no stranger magic in that than the magic of cheap beer and being a teenager on a long summer night in the middle of nowhere.

And as for bubbling cauldrons – well, how else were you supposed to make maple syrup?

(A joke, of course. The stainless steel evaporating tanks at the Blossom sugarhouse were state-of-the-art. Guided tours of the plant were available to the public each weekend, and a 10% off coupon for the gift shop was included with price of entry.)

No, for the most part, Riverdale magic wasn’t showy. It was simply this: at some point, usually during their childhood or adolescence, most folks born in Riverdale found that they had some sort of strange small talent or inexplicable ability – sometimes maybe more than one.

Locals called it “having a knack.”

A knack was some unexpected gift just a bit too difficult to account for by normal means. The ability to untangle even the trickiest of knots, for instance, or the sure-footed security that came from never once having slipped and fallen – never even wobbled – on the black ice that plagued Riverdale each spring.

Shooting a perfect free throw every time. Shooting a buck every season. Knowing like a fact, knowing like the way you knew your tongue between your teeth, who you should run _immediately_ away from if you _ever_ saw them practicing shooting a gun.

Sometimes a person’s knack might be explained as simply the result of natural human variation and inherent aptitude – like Alice Cooper’s steel trap memory. Perfect recall meant that she was the only reporter in the tri-state area who didn’t rely on a tape recorder for interviews. If you asked her about it, though, Alice always played it down: “Well, you know there are other folks out there in the world with good memories, and they aren’t all from Riverdale.”

And not all knacks made you a standout. Sure, the look on Hal Cooper’s face when he was working on an old Chevy was a dead ringer for how the priest down at St. Michael’s looked when he was transforming the Communion wine into the blood of Christ. And when he was done ( _when_ he was done), the car would run like it had just come off the assembly line last week. But there was a guy down on the South Side with a garage that specialized in classic cars, and he could do pretty near the same thing. Plus he would actually give you an ETA on when the work would be finished.

So Hal Cooper’s knack basically just made him a damn good amateur mechanic. As he liked to tell his girls, showing them at first how to check their oil and change a tire, “There’s no reason you can’t be even better at this than I am, especially if you work at it.”

The oldest girl, Polly, was polite about it because she loved her father, but she had no real interest in mucking about in the grease and the rust. The younger one, Betty, though – she paid close attention to Hal. She got good enough that they thought that maybe she’d got Hal’s knack for fixing cars. They ran in families like that sometimes, did knacks.

Betty did not get Hal’s knack. Betty’s knacks turned out to be the kind that were hard to explain away as anything but Riverdale’s peculiar magic.

 

 

Her first knack was this: anything that grew out of the ground seemed to love Betty Cooper. Trees, shrubs, flowers – everything stayed greener, blossomed earlier, and gave more and sweeter fruit when she took care of it.

It even worked on cut flowers, which is how her knack first showed itself. The summer that she was ten, Hal’s cousin’s daughter got married outdoors in the middle of a heatwave. All the beautiful floral arrangements that Aunt Mim had dropped two grand on looked like they’d been zapped in a microwave, but Betty’s flower girl bouquet alone stayed fresh and camera-ready, the creamy peonies just beginning to open as she walked down the aisle.

(She let the bride hold her flowers for the formal pictures later, of course. It was the right thing to do.)

That summer, with Betty set to weeding and watering them, Alice’s tomatoes not only survived the heatwave but delivered a bumper crop. Other people’s vines produced mealy, half-hearted fruit in that drought year, but the Cooper garden delivered watermelons so sweet and juicy that you practically needed a bib to eat them. When the girls’ sunflowers produced seed heads the size of dinner plates, and then all fifteen of Betty’s pumpkins ripened plump and unblemished, just in time to carve for Halloween, Hal and Alice each started to privately wonder. Out loud, though, they merely congratulated the girls and each other on an excellent year for the garden.

But by the end of November, when Betty’s jack o’ lantern stubbornly refused to decay weeks after Polly’s had collapsed into mush – and then when the Coopers’ Christmas tree started to grow new little pinecones, peeking out from around the shiny ornaments – well, there was no way to ignore, then, that Betty’s knack had chosen to announce itself.

At first, Betty tried not to talk about her new talent. After all, as her mother said, it wasn’t nice to put yourself forward. And even though Riverdale folks had grown accustomed to their neighbors’ gifts and quirks, the fact remained that Betty had essentially developed a magic power – something that science couldn’t explain.

The next year, as they pulled into the parking lot of the Centerville food bank to drop off several bushels of extra zucchinis, tomatoes, and salad greens, Alice cupped Betty’s cheek.

“Now sweetheart, remember. If anyone who isn’t from Riverdale asks about all of – this – just tell them that you have a green thumb.”

Still, in her secret heart, she was excited to have this small piece of her future revealed. At the pool this summer, Ginger Lopez’s older sister had taught Polly how to play MASH, and Polly had taught Betty. The sisters had played countless games together already, but after only a few, all the different possible versions of Betty’s life had started to blur together in her mind. Was she going to live in a mansion in Australia with ten kids, an apartment in Paris with none, or a house here in Riverdale with two? Now, though, no matter where she went or who she became, she would have the ability to make the world just a little bit more pleasant – a bit sweeter, a bit greener. It was nice to have that certainty.

 

 

The knack got stronger as she got older. It turned out that sometimes simply being near plants was enough for them to show the effect of Betty’s gift. The lilac bush outside Mrs. Gupta’s sixth-grade classroom nearly bent double with blossoms in the spring of the year that she taught Betty. And while no one’s window boxes bloomed prettier or longer than the Coopers, their whole block seemed to enjoy effortlessly green and velvety lawns.

Archie Andrews, her best friend and neighbor across the street, liked to tease Betty about her knack, saying that since she was responsible for all this thick green grass, maybe _she_ should be the one to mow all of the lawns. He knew that he only had to tease her a little bit for her to take pity on him and bring him a tall glass of homemade lemonade to enjoy the minute that he finished the front yard.

(What Archie didn’t know that he didn’t have to tease her at all. By the time they were eleven, Betty had a crush on Archie and would have filled an entire bathtub full of lemonade for him if he’d asked her to.)

At twelve, Archie hadn’t yet found his knack, which wasn’t unusual. Everyone agreed that ten had been quite young for Betty’s to show. Even her older sister Polly’s didn’t come in until she was fourteen; two whole years after the Riverdale Garden Club had already decided that members who paid Betty to help with their yard work were not eligible to compete in the annual garden show.

Unlike Betty, Polly did turn out to have inherited her knack from her family. Along with the normal travails of adolescence, having two people with Alice’s perfect recall under the same roof had thrown something of a wrench into relations in the Cooper household. All too often, mother and daughter had perfect and identical memories of what had been said in a conversation – but completely different interpretations of what was meant by it. 

That summer, Betty spent a lot of time over at Archie's house, or in the small space she'd created for herself in the middle of the garden, hidden by a wall of sunflowers. 

 

 

Far and away the earliest knack in their generation to show itself, though, belonged to Archie and Betty’s friend, the weedy kid from Sunnyside that everyone for some reason called Jughead. He was a strange little kid, quiet and withdrawn unless the Andrews boy or the youngest Cooper girl was around to include him in their games. So it made a kind of sense that his gift was one of the stranger ones, too, the kind that was hard to explain away to folks who weren’t from Riverdale.

And of course, the way his knack first showed itself certainly didn’t help.

Sheriff Keller, who’d reported to the scene that night, tried to keep the whole thing hushed up. He knew the kid a little bit; he was in Kevin’s class that year – third grade with Ms. Wynkoop. More to the point, he sure the hell knew FP. Unless his old man shaped up, Jughead was going to have a hard enough time ahead of him without having this story attached to his name for the rest of his years in this town.

Somehow, of course, the story got out, although no one could really remember how. Maybe someone in the trailer park who was there that night when the ambulance got there told their cousin, who was a hairdresser on the North Side and had all the best gossip. Maybe FP’s buddies wanted to know why he wasn’t riding the bike this week. Or maybe the whole story came out a few weeks later, when Mary Andrews had to step in to keep Gladys Jones from getting arrested for shoplifting gauze and ointment from the pharmacy.

In any case, if you asked someone in Riverdale that spring what they had heard about that trouble with the Jones family, they probably would have told you something like this.

 

 

It was late one night in early April, and Gladys and FP were going at it again. The fighting had gotten worse lately, as any of the neighbors could tell you. There were two kids in the trailer now, and one was a new and colicky baby whose cries often echoed over the raised voices of her parents. No one in the Jones family was getting much sleep these days – Gladys looked exhausted when she left for her shift down at the Quik-Mart and then twice as exhausted when she got home. And she’d been taking on extra hours, because it seemed that these days FP was mostly using his substantial charm to convince his buddies to stand him another round until payday.

(FP’s knack was his silver tongue. But there was no guarantee that a knack would bring you happiness, after all.)

Anyway, Gladys got home that night to find that FP had spent the week's grocery money on liquor, and she blew her stack. As anyone who’d gone to school with him could tell you, FP had managed to avoid a surprising number of well-deserved detentions, bawlings-out, and ass-kickings over the years, but tonight his charm was too sodden with alcohol for it have any effect on a woman who was growing more immune to it by the day.

And so they got into it, and at some point the quarrel turned physical – FP had nail marks on his face for a week afterwards, and everyone who stopped into the Quik-Mart for a pack of cigarettes or a gallon of milk could see the bruises on Gladys’s wrists as she rung them up.

So there they must have been, screaming and shrieking and cursing and hitting each other, the baby crying, waking up half the trailer park by this point, not to mention their eight year old son.

And the kid realizes what’s going on, and he panics, and he darts out from the tiny bedroom that he shares with his sister, because he figures somehow that it’s his job to try to push them apart before one of them does permanent damage to the other –

And where Jughead touched them – FP’s leg, Gladys’s side – his small hands seared a brand into their skin.

Second degree burns. Permanent scarring. He hadn’t meant to hurt them; he was trying to stop them from hurting each other.

He’d succeeded, but somehow they’d ended up hurt anyway.

More trouble for the Jones family.

 

 

Early on at Riverdale Elementary, some of the kids had occasionally liked to tease Jughead. For being quiet, for using a big word, for wearing the same clothes twice in a row or never bringing treats on his birthday or for bolting down his free lunch too quickly.

The teasing stopped for a while after the story of that night got around, though. Letting the weird kid know he was weird was one thing, but Reggie Mantle and Jason Blosson weren’t stupid enough to antagonize a kid who could burn your skin off with a touch of his hand if he got angry.

He wouldn’t have, though. After that first, terrible flare-up, Jughead soon discovered that he could control his knack pretty well, like turning the dial on the thermostat: no heat, some heat, lots of heat. Sure, it was harder to control if something startled him, or if he was already feeling tired or sad. But other people cried or yelled or threw things when they got angry, and no one was afraid of them, as long as they didn’t do it too much.

(He was afraid of his parents when they yelled. But now it seemed like they were a little afraid of him too.)

Jughead knew that people were scared of his power, but secretly he thought there were a lot of neat things about it. He could make a perfect s’more without having to build a campfire. He never had to eat his pizza cold, even if he was the last one in line to get a slice when Ms. Wynkoop’s class earned a pizza party at the end of the year. And it turned out that he didn’t need gloves in even the worst Riverdale winter, which meant one less thing that his mom had to worry about buying.

Still, it’s not like he had been popular before, and now most of the other kids pretty much just gave him a wide berth. Frankly, he preferred it that way. It was too complicated when you had to think about all those other people.

(He should have known that something was wrong, when Archie had his tonsils out in fourth grade and missed a week of school convalescing, when Jason and Reggie started acting friendly, asking him about his knack, begging him to show them how to boil water straight out of the drinking fountain, then betting him that he couldn’t make that heap of pencil shavings ignite…

So then he was Jughead Jones, who spent a week in juvie after Jason and Reggie heroically prevented him from burning down the school. He never made the mistake of trusting those two again.)

It wasn’t just the kids. He saw a little flash of hesitation every time his teachers handed back his homework. When he pushed his pennies across the counter at the candy store, the clerk touched them gingerly at first, making sure they weren’t hot to the touch. Every time he returned his books to the Riverdale library, the librarian always skimmed through them suspiciously, as if she was looking for scorch marks.

And after that night, Gladys touched him as little as possible. He understood why, but it still hurt.

So he treasured the people who didn’t seem to mind getting close. Jellybean couldn’t remember a time when her brother hadn’t been able to turn water to steam with his hands, or a time when he had ever used that power to hurt someone, so she was forever clinging on his leg, climbing into his lap, and demanding to be picked up. Mary Andrews had always hugged him when he came over to play at Archie’s house, and she kept right on doing so, up until the very last, longest hug she gave him on the morning she left for Chicago. Even once she was gone, whenever Fred Andrews saw him, he always ruffled Jughead’s hair or gave him a hug or a high five. He made extra sure to do it in front of the other kids and their parents, as if to say, “See? Nothing to be afraid of.”

Whether it was because of their example, or maybe just because he could never see the bad in anyone, Archie treated him exactly the same before and after that awful April night. He never hesitated to squeeze in the back seat of Fred’s pickup truck with Jughead, to sling an arm around his shoulder in friendship, or to lean into him to try to run him off the road in Mario Kart.

And in fourth grade, when he came back from a week of never-ending popsicles and the worst sore throat he'd ever had and found out what Reggie and Jason had done in his absence, Archie spent the whole next week off school too – a one week out of school suspension after he sucker-punched Reggie square in the face.

Archie Andrews was his best friend. And since Archie was Betty Cooper’s best friend, that meant that Jughead and Betty were best friends too.

Betty didn’t punch anyone for him, which was fine. If she had, her mom and dad probably would have grounded her for life and forbidden her from ever speaking to him again. But she always brought an extra cupcake in her lunch for him, always made sure to unfreeze him when everyone played freeze tag, and always let him read the books she got from the book order – even the ones she hadn’t started yet.

Archie was loyal and Betty was generous, and when the three of them were together, sprawled on a blanket in Archie’s back yard, gazing up at the stars, Jughead knew that he didn’t need anyone other than them.

 

 

There was one more reason that Betty was his other best friend.

The other kids at school were afraid of his knack, while Archie simply pretended that it didn’t exist.

But between October and March, when the winds blew cold during outdoor recess, Betty would sidle up to him shyly with a question in her big green eyes.

“Will you warm my hands, Juggie?”

Sometimes he would sigh and pretend to be annoyed, or tease her about having ice water in her veins. More often, he would make her promise to bring him a slice of her first watermelon in the summer, or a second cupcake tomorrow.

But he never said no.

Secretly, he loved it when she asked: the bracing shock of cold when she first grasped his hands; her grateful little sigh when his warmth began to thaw her fingertips.

And most of all, the unhesitating trust with which she let her hands rest in his. Her soft white hands, which everyone would learn brought life and beauty, wrapped without a thought in his hands, which had so infamously – if accidentally – brought pain and ashes.

Why should he care if other kids thought he was scary, when Betty Cooper thought he was special?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been mainlining Alice Hoffman novels and Riverdale fanfic this summer, and this is what my brain spun out at me one evening a week or so ago. There's definitely some "Betty as Persephone" Tumblr aesthetic mixed into the DNA of this too. And if you're reading writing_as_tracey's [series about Betty Cooper's slow journey into Serpenthood](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11319753/chapters/25336347)...there's a pretty obvious reference towards the beginning there. :D
> 
> [Sunflower houses](http://www.savvyhousekeeping.com/grow-a-sunflower-house/) are a real thing, if you feel like trying them!
> 
> Title comes from near the end of Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale." A statue of King Leontes' dead wife Hermione is revealed to be the actual woman, restored to life, and Leontes declares: "O, she's warm! If this be magic, let it be an art lawful as eating."
> 
> Feedback and comments always appreciated! And always feel free to say hi on Tumblr at village-skeptic.


	2. Chapter 2

On his fifteenth birthday, Archie Andrews’ knack finally announced itself.

That morning, his father had greeted him with the twin pillars of Archie’s birthday tradition: a towering stack of pancakes, and a birthday card stuffed with the number of dollar scratch-off lottery tickets that corresponded to Archie’s new age.

“You’re getting old, kiddo,” Fred said, from his position in front of the stove. “I had to break out the Scotch tape to get that envelope to stay closed. You might have to graduate to the two-dollar scratchers next year.”

“Yeah…or, I don’t know, you could forget about the tickets and just give me the money?” Archie teased his father, before shoveling the first forkful of pancakes into his mouth.

“Never gonna happen, Arch. You’d rather trade fifteen possible chances to be a millionaire for fifteen measly bucks? Where’s your sense of adventure, your hunger for the unknown?”

“Right now the main hunger I’ve got is for some bacon to go with these pancakes.”

Fred laughed, poking at one of the skillets on the stove. “It’ll be ready in a minute or two. In the meantime, you can open your card and see which one of those tickets is going to make you a wealthy man.” He dug around in his pockets, found a spare penny, and flipped it across the kitchen at Archie.

Archie was distracted, though. He was scrolling through his messages, reading a long birthday text from his mother, who promised to call later that evening.

So it was a good thing that he looked up just in time to catch the penny, preventing it from completing what would have been a neat parabola right into his orange juice.

Fred shook his head ruefully. “I don’t know whether to congratulate you on a nice catch or yell at you for messing up my perfect throw. That was going to be nothing but net, son.”

Archie drained half the glass, just in case his dad decided to try a second time, and set to scratching off the first ticket. “Hey, I won something! Three bunches of grapes – that means…one dollar.” He grinned. “I’m going to need a few more of these if I’m shooting for the millionaires’ club, Dad.”

“A long journey begins with a single step,” quipped Fred, bringing over a platter of the promised bacon along with his own pancakes, and settling down across from Archie.

Archie finished scratching off the second ticket and frowned. “Nothing. Technically, a short journey also begins with a single step.”

“Hey, you’re already doing better than last year. Zero for fourteen – not my proudest moment.”

The next one was a loser too. But the next six in a row were winners – two $5 prizes, one more $1 prize, and three free tickets.

When he scraped off the tenth ticket to reveal a $20 prize, Archie gave his dad an incredulous look. “Dad, is this a birthday prank?”

Fred shook his head. “They’re real, kiddo. Picked them up at Balducci’s newsstand on the way home from the construction site last night. Maybe there was some kind of misprint – they put all the winners together on one reel?”

“If so, what are we doing sitting here? We ought to drive right over and buy the rest of them.”

The last five tickets revealed two more duds – but also two more free tickets and another $5 prize.

Fred’s grin couldn’t be dimmed. “Still wish I’d just given you the fifteen bucks?”

Archie ducked his head sheepishly, but couldn’t hide his answering smile. “Guess my old man still knows a thing or two.”

“That’s more than you’re going to know if you don’t get a move-on. School bus comes in ten minutes and you’re still sitting here in pajamas.”

Archie wolfed down the last of his pancakes in record time. But before he left the room, he walked over to the sink, where Fred was running hot water over the breakfast dishes.

“Thanks, Dad,” he said quietly. “It’s been a great birthday already.”

Fred rested a wet hand on his son’s shoulder, pulling him in for a quick hug and realizing as he did that Archie was as tall as he was now.

(Time kept passing, no matter how you felt about it. Up until last year, Mary had been the one who made the pancakes.)

“Love you, kid,” he said gruffly. “Leave the tickets on the table. I’ll trade them in for you and get the new ones tonight.”

“Make sure to get the million-dollar winners this time, okay?” Archie dodged Fred’s playful cuff as he headed for the stairs.

 

 

After dinner that evening, Archie scratched off five tickets. Two dollars; one dollar; three free tickets. No duds.

Fred and Archie drove across town to the Quik-Stop on the South Side to cash those in. And then they drove to the all-night mini-mart in Centerville to redeem that set for two dollars and three free tickets.

And then they cashed _those_ in for five dollars and two free tickets.

“Looks like one of you is a pretty lucky guy,” said the cashier, who’d rung them up just five minutes earlier.

“Seems so,” Fred answered blandly.

They sat in the front seat of the pick-up, and the lights from the convenience store illuminated the tickets as Archie scratched them off, his hand trembling a little.

A two-dollar winner and a one-dollar winner. Fifty dollars from fifteen, across twenty-five tickets.

“Holy crap, Dad. Should we…I don’t know, should we take this and drive to Vegas?”

“You’re fifteen, Archie. There’s not a casino on the Strip that would let you in. Not to mention fifty bucks wouldn’t even cover gas money.”

Fred worried his lip between his teeth for a second and seemed to come to a decision. “Hand me that penny, kiddo.” He positioned the coin on top of his thumb. “Ready? Call it in the air.”

Archie called heads. He called heads the next six times, too. Lincoln’s face showed every time, and the look on Archie’s face grew more and more disbelieving.

Fred shook his head slowly, ran his hand through his hair and let out a laugh that was half a sigh. “Well, son. Looks like you’ve found yourself a knack.”

 

 

Archie told his best friends the whole story the next night over his birthday dinner at Pop’s.

“We stayed up all night testing it,” he said, dipping a French fry in his chocolate shake and cramming it in his mouth. “The luck works on little stuff, basically. Coin flips, rock-paper-scissors – that kind of thing. And apparently lottery tickets, but only small prizes. We went through twenty-five tickets and I didn’t win anything more than $20.”

Jughead leaned across the table. “No, Archie. You won fifty bucks. Fifty bucks, man! Why didn’t you smash your piggy bank and have your dad buy all the scratchers they had in the store?”

“First of all, Dad isn’t even letting me keep that money. He told me I had to pay for dinner tonight.”

Betty frowned. “Arch, it’s your birthday. We should be picking up the tab for you.”

Arch smiled at her. “No way, Betts. You already got me the best possible gift. Nothing beats that fudge layer cake you make me every year.”

Betty’s cheeks pinkened at the praise, even as she continued to argue her point.

(Out of the corner of his eye, Jughead noticed that the single, droopy carnation on their table was beginning to fluff out with fresh petals.)

“Betty might be an independent woman, but I will gladly allow you to buy me as many burgers as you would like. Still – I repeat: Why are we not neck-deep in lottery tickets right now?”

Archie swallowed his mouthful of burger. “The luck wears off if I push it too much. I lost half the money back to Dad playing blackjack – kept asking him to hit me when I should have stayed. I can guess a coin flip right almost all the time if there’s no stakes, but I’m nowhere near as good if we bet something on the outcome, especially if it’s a big bet. I won twenty bucks back from my dad, but I had to do it, like, a quarter at a time.”

He grinned. “It’s not just money, either. I don’t have to take out the garbage for the next month and a half. But then I tried for ten flips to get my curfew pushed to midnight on weekdays, and I was wrong every single time, even when I said the opposite of what I was thinking. So, I’m lucky, but I’m not that lucky.”

“You know, I wish I’d known about this before we decided to spend a whole weekend playing _Mortal Kombat_ last month.” Jughead said thoughtfully.

Archie started laughing so hard he choked on his milkshake. “Oh my God, dude. We played twenty games before you landed a single fatality on me. We thought the game was broken. You got so mad that you melted the one controller a little bit.”

“It still works, though – so there’s that Andrews luck.”

 

 

Later that night, Jughead was stretched out on an air mattress on Archie’s floor, hovering right on the edge of sleep, when he heard Archie murmur something that sounded like a question.

“What was that, Arch?”

There was a pause before Archie answered, long enough that Jughead thought that he might have been imagining it, but then Archie asked again:

“Do you think I’m responsible for things now, Jug?”

He continued. “Like, with the luck. What if one of those lottery tickets that my dad bought for me was supposed to go to someone who really needed the money? Does me being lucky make other people unlucky? Or – am I supposed to become, like, a doctor or a scientist? To try to use my luck to save people’s lives or make discoveries or something?”

He could hear Archie swallow hard. “I just feel bad that, when I found out about the knack, instead of thinking about helping people, I was thinking about stupid shit like lottery tickets and video games, and – football. I really want to try out for varsity next year, but is it cheating for me to play now? How do I have this knack and still be a good person?”

Jughead sighed and sat up. “Archie. You are a good person. The knack isn’t going to change that. Yes, there are things that you could try to use it for that would be more or less selfish than others, but you said it yourself – your luck doesn’t change the big stuff.”

He paused, trying to find the right words. “It’s like…the universe has decided to put its thumb on the scales for you a little bit. Which is great. But in comparison to child soldiers and people dying from malaria or starvation, we’re all lucky. Hell, we’re both lucky compared to some people here in Riverdale. And so we all probably have some responsibility to try to make the world a less shitty place. So maybe you got this knack because you’re the kind of person who thinks about this stuff. Just be Archie Andrews and try to make the best choices you can, and I think you’ll be all right.”

“Thanks, Jug,” Archie said quietly.

“And seriously, man, you need to sleep. You said you and your dad were up all night working the knack out, right? Leave the existential questions and the insomnia to the expert here and get some rest.”

He heard Archie chuckle sleepily, and then the rustling noises that meant that the other boy was turning over and settling into a new position.

After it was quiet, Jughead waited for a few seconds, and then added:

“But you do have to let me win next time we play _Mortal Kombat_.”

 

 

 

To Jughead, Archie was still just the same good-hearted, easy-going guy that he’d been friends with since kindergarten. But Archie’s new-found luck did change how some people around Riverdale saw him. Jughead realized this one afternoon after gym class, when the knowledge hit him quite literally like a sheet of metal to the back of the head.

_Thud._

The door of Jughead’s gym locker collided squarely with his occipital bone, and he let out a yelp before choking it off with a curse. Across the room, Jason and Reggie howled with laughter.

_Thud. Thud._

He moved quickly, scooping his clothes out of the locker and setting them on the low bench in the center of the changing area, but the door still managed to hit him in the shoulder twice more before he finished emptying the space.

 

When Reggie Mantle’s knack had kicked in during the previous year, it had taken precisely one week before the principal called his parents in for a disciplinary meeting. After the fifth time that “a sudden breeze” had blown Tina Patel’s skirt up around her face as she walked by Reggie and his friends, she told her parents what was going on. At that point, Mrs. Patel promptly phoned Principal Westmore and reminded him that there was nothing about the phenomenon of local magic that obviated Title IX legislative protections, and that he’d better establish some discipline at that middle school unless he wanted to explain to the superintendent why Riverdale School District was the subject of an extremely public and embarrassing lawsuit.

Trust Reggie Mantle to decide that the most appropriate use of mild telekinesis was sexual harassment.

Anyway, now Reggie only made sure to use his knack in ways that “helped to promote a healthy and respectful learning environment” – or to fuck with people when he was absolutely sure no adults were watching.

That was frustrating in a larger sense, but today it was frustrating because he’d mostly figured out how to avoid this particular situation. If he waited as long as possible to change before and after gym, he could generally miss Reggie, Jason and the rest of the Bulldog football goons who had somehow ended up in this gym class.

Yes, that meant an absurdly short amount of time to wash up, dress, and make it to next period close enough to on time that the teacher would just roll her eyes instead of writing him up. But Jughead had gotten pretty efficient at the process, even if that meant that half the time he was still shrugging one shoulder into his jacket or tying a flannel around his waist as he slid into the seat that Betty always saved for him.

 

(Last week, on the third day in a row that he’d arrived just before the bell, she’d waited till the teacher turned around to slip him a note. It said “You forgot to pull the suspenders up _again_?” Because she was Betty, she’d added a winky-face at the end to make sure he knew she was kidding.

He’d scowled at her playfully and was rewarded with the full-on Betty smile that reminded him for the millionth time why everything burst into bloom around her.

He still didn’t pull up the suspenders, though.)

 

Today, though, he had to be in class not just on time, but early. Even though they’d spent the last half hour walking around the track and talking through their presentation on themes of light and dark in _The Scarlet Letter_ , Betty still had herself wound up with nerves.

“Jug, we have to be there at least fifteen minutes before class starts. One of us has to pass out the quote sheets as everyone comes in, and we have to make sure that the Power Point is loaded on the computer - I have it backed up on my email in case the computer doesn’t recognize my flash drive, but then that’ll take time for me to log in, and -- ”

He caught her by the wrist and tugged gently. “You’re spiraling, Betts. We’ll be fine. It’s a ten-minute presentation in honors English, not a plenary session at the United Nations.”

She huffed indignantly, and just for a second, she was pure Alice Cooper as she said, “That’s no excuse not to do our best.”

Affection beat out annoyance in his tone when he answered her. “And we will – you, in particular, Betty. I could be struck down in my prime by the unquiet ghosts of our Puritan ancestors on my way to class, and you would still give an A-plus presentation.”

She gave him a little smile, but there was still a little furrow of worry between her brows as she said, “Call Egon or Holtzy to fix you up with a spare proton pack if you’re worried about ghosts, Juggie, but please do everything you can be on time today. Just for my sake.”

 

So against his will and better judgment, he’d hit the locker room today at the same time as everyone else. And for his pains, he’d found himself in Reggie’s cross-hairs.

He leaned back in time, and this time the locker door missed him, shutting with a loud clang.

“Check it out, you guys!” called Reggie in a delighted tone. “Looks like fuckin’ Ghost Rider decided to grace us with his presence today.”

“To what do we owe the honor, Fahrenheit 451?”

(He would have been more impressed by Jason’s reference if he didn’t know that they were reading Bradbury in tenth-grade English right now. He would be willing to bet money that Jason actually liked the idea of lighting books on fire.)

Reggie smirked. “He probably just wants to see us all naked. How about it, Human Torch? You a flamer in that way too?”

Out of the corner of his eye, a few lockers down, Jughead saw Kevin Keller freeze in place for a second or two before a carefully blank mask dropped over his face, and he resumed tying his shoelaces with precise, purposeful motions.

Meanwhile, Reggie had found his stride. “Shit, man, you’d have to be pretty hard up to let Jones suck your dick. You just know this pyro freak would get too excited and poof – weenie roast!”

Jughead couldn’t have cared less about this stupid bro shit, but he also knew Reggie wouldn’t stop until he got a reaction. So he eased off the control and let the knack flare.

“Wow, Reggie, you got it right,” he said in a bored voice, leaning back against the lockers and lifting his right hand, which was now glowing like a live coal. “Why don’t you come get the high-five you deserve for being such a clever boy?”

“Don’t even joke about touching me, you fucking freak,” sneered Reggie. But Jughead could hear the little edge of fear in his voice, and that meant all the other guys in the locker room could too. So of course Reggie had to double down. “Save that shit for when you’re jerking off Archie Andrews. Or won’t Betty let you take a turn?”

Stupid. It’s all _so_ stupid. They’ve all known each other for a decade or longer; they all know where to hit to make it hurt. For him, those tender spots had always been Betty and Archie, and then, lately, for reasons he didn’t want to examine too closely, the amalgam of Betty-and-Archie that somehow resulted in wilting flowers blooming anew. He knew what Reggie was doing. But, stupidly, the anger still surged up in him, and he could feel paint beginning to blister below his fingertips where they rested on the locker.

Salvation came from the unlikeliest source, as Jason elbowed Reggie. “Knock it off, man,” he said lightly, but there was seriousness underneath his tone. “Can’t have you talking about my girlfriend’s sister like that.”

His girlfriend’s sister? That was – Polly? Jason and Polly were a thing?

“And you’d better get used to Andrews, because he’s going to be our secret weapon on the field next year. With all these seniors graduating, the Bulldogs are going to need all the luck we can get.”

Reggie scoffed. “You’re just saying that because he’s, like, your Mini-Me. All you soulless gingers gotta stick together --”

Jughead didn’t hear anything else, because he was fully dressed now and leaving the circle of hell that was the boys’ locker room as fast as he could.

But as he dodged around his fellow students in the chaos of the hallways, hurrying to get to class before Betty had time to psych herself out again, his thoughts kept circling back to Jason’s words.

Jason Blossom’s latest girlfriend was Polly Cooper? Sensitive Polly Cooper, who had cried for an entire day two summers ago when their neighbor’s cat killed a baby bunny? Polly Cooper, whose inability to forget often made it equally hard for her to forgive? According to Betty, Polly could – and frequently did – brood for weeks about whether a tactless comment had been said in thoughtlessness or in spite. So what had she possibly found to like in a big man on campus like Jason Blossom, who for years had flaunted his casual cruelty like a badge of honor?

He wasn’t going to mention it before their presentation, but he wondered if Betty knew that Polly was dating Jason. Blood was thicker than water and all that, but he hadn’t sensed any unusual tension between the sisters lately, and he couldn’t imagine that Betty would take the news that Polly and Jason were a couple lightly.

There was a time, he knew, that Betty and Polly would have told each other everything. He had no idea if that was still the case. Things like that could shift, obviously. People grew up; they grew apart, even if they were siblings. Even if they had been close. That was the plot of, like, every adolescent novel ever.

(He very carefully did not think about the fact that Jason and Archie were apparently friends now.)

 

 

 

For Betty, the discovery of Archie’s knack was immaterial. When she thought about Archie and luck, it was only in the sense that she hoped that one day that she’d be lucky enough that he might finally see her as more than just a friend. But, in a roundabout way, Betty’s feelings for Archie led to the realization of her own second knack.

With a major Spanish test approaching and his grade on the line, Archie turned to the same person who had helped him learn to read in English back when they were first graders. Betty’s mother begrudgingly gave her permission to help Archie study in the evening in the week before the exam – with the caveat that she had to finish and double-check all of her own homework first, of course.

That week so far had been a really, really good one for Betty. She’d been able to get all her homework done in study hall, the initial brainstorming meeting for the Spring Fling planning committee had been surprisingly productive, and her English teacher had given her and Jughead top marks on their project, observing that they made an excellent team.

Things were good at home, too: subscriptions were up at the _Register_ , and her dad had gotten his hands on a tough-to-find part for the vintage Firebird they were restoring. Polly seemed happier lately, too – she and Alice hadn’t fought in days, which felt like some sort of record.

With everyone in a good mood, mandatory Cooper family dinners seemed less like a punishment and more like the cherished family ritual that they were supposed to be. Even dinner this week had seemed to taste better – the pot roast juicier, the salad crisper. Last night, Betty’s mother had actually taken a second helping of Polly’s apple cobbler, looking surprised at herself as she did so.

And as if all of this largesse from the universe wasn’t enough, she had gotten to spend the past three evenings, on a school night, hanging out with Archie – just the two of them.

Tonight, his fingers had brushed hers when he handed her the packet of flash cards. It had probably just been an accident. But she thought maybe he had held on for a few seconds longer than usual when they hugged goodbye at the end of the night?

Betty wasn’t sure, but it was enough to set her beaming as she crossed the space between their houses and slipped inside her own front door.

Because Alice and Hal had needed to work late at the _Register_ , Betty had been allowed to skip Cooper family dinner tonight and – miracle of miracles – eat pizza at Archie’s.

(Pizza was good. Pizza eaten while free from her mother’s scrutiny about caloric intake was better. Pizza eaten in Archie’s kitchen, while Archie told her about spring football tryouts and encouraged her to try out again for the River Vixens, was the best.)

 

So she was surprised, when her mother called her into the dining room, to see all three Coopers seated around the table, with seemingly untouched servings of leftover apple cobbler sitting in front of them. A dish was waiting at her place.

“So we’ve converted Cooper family dinner into Cooper family dessert now?” Betty joked, sitting down and tucking cautiously into her cobbler.

It might have been slightly better last night hot from the oven with vanilla ice cream on the side, but it was still really good cold from the refrigerator. The chunks of apple were perfectly sweet-tart, bursting in Betty’s mouth with every bite, and the crunchy oat topping was rich without being too buttery.

She swallowed, and wondered why everyone was staring at her. “Is…everything okay?”

Alice leaned forward, scanning her face with an anticipatory gleam. “How is the cobbler, dear?”

This was clearly a loaded question, but Betty had no idea why. So she answered cautiously. “It’s delicious, Mom. Polly really did a great job with it.” She turned to her sister with an encouraging smile. “Did you try something different, Polly?”

“You might say that,” Alice replied. She took a small bite, chewed, and swallowed, all while shaking her head. “Well, Hal, the apple cobbler is now delicious again.” She gestured with her fork and her father took a cautious bite, chewing with a look of consternation on his face.

Betty caught her sister’s eye, asking as plainly as she could without words – what is up with Mom and Dad? But Polly just looked down, poking warily at the dessert in front of her.

Her dad spoke first. “Honey…we took the cobbler to work today to share. And when we tried it there – well, there’s no other word for it. It was terrible.”

Alice broke in. “We quickly realized that your sister had somehow used cumin instead of cinnamon, which – the smell _alone_ should have been enough to tell you, Polly –”

“Fine, Mom. I’m a terrible cook, I get it already,” Polly muttered.

Betty put her hand on her sister’s shoulder in a gesture of comfort. “Polly, no! Mom, Dad, what are you talking about? Mom, I know you remember – we all sat here last night and said how delicious it was. You even had seconds.”

Her mother arched an eyebrow. “Of course I remember, Betty. We raved about it. And then your father and I ate it at work and it was God-awful. We all tried a bite before you came home to make sure, and it was, if possible, even worse. And then, Betty, you came home tonight and the cobbler that we all agreed was terrible for a very specific, very identifiable reason, suddenly tasted amazing again.”

She drained her glass of wine, and fixed Betty with a bright, predatory smile. “So, Betty dear. For how long have you known that you could control people’s minds?”

 

 

As anyone could have told you, Alice had outsized ambitions for her girls – not to mention a flair for drama. Betty’s second knack was definitely not mind-control.

Control didn’t have much to do with it at all, and that was really the crux of the issue.

One of Alice Cooper’s pet peeves was people who used food as an emotional crutch. If she saw Polly treating a sullen mood with a dish of Rocky Road, or Betty baking brownies to try to quell her nerves about an upcoming exam, she would always remind them: “Don’t eat your feelings, girls.”

So it was particularly ironic that this new knack meant that now _everyone_ was eating Betty’s feelings.

The first part of what Betty eventually worked out about her new knack was this: when she was feeling particularly happy or excited or content, everyone around her could literally taste her joy. Home cooking became haute cuisine, and even burnt toast or bland cafeteria food set her tablemates’ tastebuds tingling.

As the Coopers began to understand the principles governing Betty’s new ability, the circumstances of her knack’s discovery were cast into question. It was not lost on her mother that the two evenings that Betty had inadvertently elevated cumin-flavored apple cobbler to the most delectable of desserts were two evenings that she had spent with Archie Andrews.

By the time that Alice finished grilling her on what _precisely_ she and Archie had been doing together on those evenings – a conversation all the more humiliating because they really had just been studying, and how pathetic was that? – Betty thought that she might be the first person to ever actually die from embarrassment.

That was how her family discovered that Betty’s new knack was really a double-edged sword. Try as she might to hide it, her resentment over her mother’s interrogation was still simmering as they sat down to dinner that night. And bite by bite, the Coopers realized that Alice’s carefully-basted roast now tasted bland and chewy, the mashed potatoes were mealy, and the string beans were mushy and oversalted.

“Betty Cooper, are you doing this?” Alice gestured angrily at her plate.

“I’m not doing it on purpose,” Betty protested.

“Young lady, you need to fix your attitude,” said her mother pointedly.

But when this reprimand produced no discernable improvement, Alice stood up, took her plate to the kitchen, scraped it into the trash, and went upstairs, slamming the door to her bedroom without a word. More pragmatic, Hal just sighed, directed the girls to clean up, and escaped to the garage with a beer.

As she and Polly cleared the table and began to scoop the leftovers into Tupperware, Betty realized was still furious with her mother, but mixed in there was also a feeling of triumph. She had disobeyed her mother, and it had been Alice who blinked – and Betty hadn’t had to cry, or yell, or do anything other than simply feel the way she felt.

She nibbled on a green bean, just to test. It tasted crisper and fresher already.

So that night she and Polly ate dinner standing up, hushed and giggling, in the kitchen – and had all the mashed potatoes they wanted, each bite richer and creamier than the last.

 

 

Her new knack wasn’t exactly useful, but it was, Betty reflected, pretty neat in certain circumstances. She had always tried to look on the bright side of a situation anyway – to “practice an attitude of gratitude,” as one of her teachers liked to say. Keeping a positive outlook meant that most of the time her knack made her day just a little more pleasant. She liked to think of it as unlocking the hidden potential in whatever she was eating – reminding a stale granola bar of the time when it was freshly-baked; inspiring a scoop of butter brickle ice cream to strive for a more nuanced and compelling range of rich toffee flavor.

The problem, though, was that the effects of her new knack seemed to be completely beyond her volition.

Betty had never been able to control her effect on plants, either – but no one had really minded that. Rather, people actively sought her out when they needed their gardens to yield enough watermelons for the family reunion, or when they wanted to ensure that the cuttings from their grandmother’s prized rose bush rooted properly. They thanked her; they praised her; they told her what a good and special girl she was.

Things were different with this second knack. Tasting someone else’s emotions had to be unsettling, Betty imagined, especially when you weren’t even sure if that’s what was happening. As Polly had told her, “This iced mocha latte tastes like angels made it, and that’s great, but it’s a bit…disorienting that I can’t tell whether it’s because they’ve finally hired a competent barista or because you got a perfect score on your math test.”

Polly always tried to say things as nicely as possible, choosing her words carefully because she knew she would have to remember them. Betty knew what Polly wasn’t saying, though: that it was intrusive to suddenly taste someone else’s anger or fear or disappointment on your tongue. It was frustrating to have your meal, maybe even your day, ruined in such a surprisingly intimate and unexpected fashion.

This new knack meant that it was nearly impossible for people – including herself – to ignore the emotions that even she didn’t want to feel.

 

She had been worried about what her friends would say when she told them about her situation. Everyone in Riverdale knew about their neighbors’ strange little quirks and unusual talents, but most knacks weren’t quite this…pervasive. She couldn’t really remember how she had told her peers about her “green thumb,” or if she even had – it had simply been a part of her for so long now that no one questioned it.

When she finally plucked up her courage to tell them – at lunch, appropriately enough -- it went surprisingly OK, though. Ethel simply gave her a shy smile and said, “That’s really cool, Betty,” and Midge joked, “I’m not worried – there’s nothing you can do to make my mom’s leftovers any worse.”

Kevin had perfect night vision – “I never trip over things in the middle of the night; _so_ boring” – and was, as he would cheerfully admit, slightly obsessed with other people’s more unusual knacks. He had a million questions about how it worked, and even though Betty felt a little like his pet science project, she also had to admit that his enthusiasm and complete lack of judgment helped.

From the day she told him and perpetually thereafter, Archie swore that he could barely notice a difference, no matter what Betty’s mood was like. Betty wasn’t sure whether he just wanted to make her feel less self-conscious, whether his luck meant that his tastebuds were protected from her influence – or if being around Archie was just always enough to bring her spirits up.

(She certainly wasn’t going to ask him which one he thought it was.)

But because he loved food more than anybody that she (or maybe anyone) knew, she had been the most worried to tell Jughead. She didn’t think he would appreciate anyone messing with his meals, on purpose or not. But he just raised his eyebrows, grinned at her, said, “Guess it’s in my best interest to keep you in a good mood,” and took another big bite of his cheeseburger.

 

 

 

Honestly, the news of Betty’s second knack hadn’t surprised him. For years, he’d secretly thought that milkshakes and hamburgers at Pop’s tasted best when Betty was in the booth across from him and Archie. He was, perhaps, a bit surprised to hear that the phenomenon affected other people now, too – even people who didn’t care as much about a good meal as he did. If they wanted to call it a knack, that was fine. Anyone who’d ever tasted Betty’s seven-layer dream bars knew that magic had to be involved in their creation somehow.

And as far as the potential negative effects on his tastebuds – well, knack or no knack, it’s not like he would have really enjoyed his meal anyway if he knew Betty was sitting there with something weighing on her mind. At least this way he had a chance of cheering her up.

Not everyone was so sanguine about Betty’s new gift, though.

 

The cafeteria’s lasagna was never that good, but it was rarely this bad – and it hadn’t been this bad a minute ago, either. Jughead swallowed with an effort and put down his fork.

Midge had buttonholed Betty as soon as she sat down – some drama with the Spring Fling decorating committee – but Jughead caught her eye for just long enough to quirk an eyebrow at her, clearly asking you okay, Betts?

Her tiny lift of one shoulder communicated back meh, before whatever Midge was asking her required her full attention. He took the opportunity to give her a quick once-over. There were shadows under Betty’s eyes, and she looked paler than usual. Maybe she was sick?

He had apparently been concentrating hard enough on his surreptitious examination of Betty that he didn’t see Cheryl Blossom before she was nearly upon them, red hair shining like a warning beacon.

She slammed one hand on the table to get everyone’s attention, and then pointed one scarlet nail directly at Betty.

“Listen up, Our Lady of Sorrows, as loath as I am to interfere with anything that might potentially function as an effective weight loss plan for you and Raggedy Ann here” – she sketched a quick circle in the air that encompassed both Betty and Ethel – “I need you to find a way to drop an early curtain on the whole Broadway matinee performance of _Les Miserables_ that you have going on over here.”

She gestured across the cafeteria. “Over there, Jason and I have the very last pieces of the Gateau Reine de Saba that Mommy had flown in from Paris for our birthday last week. Now, I don’t expect you peasants to be familiar with fine patisserie, so let me attempt to translate: it’s something like a really good Hostess cupcake, except actually edible. And I refuse to have this culinary experience ruined by the fact that it’s Betty Cooper’s shark week – or whatever your present damage happens to be.”

“How about you take a second to figure out what _your_ problem is, Cheryl?” Midge shot back. “Betty’s allowed to have a bad day every once in a while, and she can’t help projecting her feelings. Meanwhile, you walk around ruining people’s days 24/7 pretty much for the fun of it, as far as I can see.”

“Come on, Midge,” Kevin said with a tiny, vicious smile. “You know Cheryl couldn’t possibly know what it’s like to try to control a knack.”

Beside him, Jughead heard Ethel give a tiny gasp.

The plethora of swimming awards in Riverdale High’s athletics trophy case was a testament to Jason Blossom’s knack – he could hold his breath for an unusually long time, giving him an edge in the water. On land, he was agile as a cat – and, Jughead thought, equally as self-satisfied. But his twin sister Cheryl had yet to evince any sort of unusual ability.

She was far from the only person in Riverdale for whom that was true, of course. Not everyone was favored with a knack, but it was extremely uncommon for a member of one of Riverdale’s founding families to go without.

Twin spots of pink appeared high on Cheryl’s cheeks before she settled her face back into a study of bored nonchalance. “I have a high metabolism, a 4.0 GPA, amazing fashion sense, and a family fortune in maple syrup. Unlike the rest of you sad extras from _Mystery Men_ , the acquisition of a cut-rate superpower would do absolutely nothing to improve my perfectly fabulous life.”

She tossed her hair over one shoulder. “So Kevin, while I’m sure you need that little night vision trick to help you see inside the closet, I think I’ll pass. And Betty, kindly hook yourself up with some Midol – or better yet, some Prozac – so that we can all enjoy our food in peace.”

And, without waiting for an answer, she wheeled around and stormed off.

Betty folded her arms on the table, hid her face and groaned, while Ethel patted her back soothingly and Archie declared loudly that Cheryl was crazy, because he couldn’t taste anything unusual.

“That girl is so unbelievably extra,” marveled Kevin. “She knows that I’ve been out since sixth grade.”

“She’s the one who needs the Midol,” said Midge darkly. “Christ in heaven, what a bitch on wheels.”

“What I hate most is that she’s kind of right – about me, at least,” said Betty in a small voice. “These cramps are killing me.”

Archie flushed bright red and shot him a panicky look. “So, uh, Kevin and Jughead – did you guys understand that worksheet on the Constitution for history class?”

Kevin rolled his eyes at Archie’s squeamishness, but he gamely launched into an explanation of the historical context of quartering soldiers in private homes during peacetime. This, in turn, led to a larger, table-wide discussion of the factors leading to the American Revolution, which then in turn led to a clarification that, _yes_ Archie, the English were _very much_ involved in the French and Indian War.

Jughead allowed himself to be drawn into the conversation, but he still kept an eye on Betty. She laughed along with the rest of them at Kevin’s impressions of George Washington wandering around western Pennsylvania starting fights, but he noted the tension in her shoulders and the way that one hand would occasionally ball into a fist, as if she was warding off a wave of pain.

The stupid thing was that he was pretty sure that he actually could have helped. He remembered one day arriving home from first grade to find his mother stretched out on their couch, an ancient heating pad resting on her abdomen. Her offhand explanation – “it’s just the curse, Juggie” – had only led to more questions, and eventually to The Question of where babies came from. Ultimately, she had given him what he now recognized was a drastically simplified, sanitized explanation; but he could still remember his mind whirling, trying to process it all – the secret to human existence, rooted in the love between two people.

Just for a second, he allowed himself to imagine Betty on the couch instead, and himself beside her. The satisfaction of reaching out and pulling her down close against him, snuggled back to front, his face buried in her hair. Splaying his hand across her flat belly, as wide as his fingers would spread, and tapping into the knack, using gentle circles of warmth to relax the muscles and soothe her pain away. The softness of her skin there against his fingertips –

A tide of heat rolled through him that had absolutely nothing to do with his knack and everything to do with being a teenage boy.

He quickly looked down and shoveled a big forkful of lasagna into his mouth before anyone could see the flush on his cheeks. It still wasn’t great, but it was better than it had been: no longer freezer-burned TV dinner; maybe more like reheated week-old Olive Garden leftovers.

“Ugh, fine,” sighed Archie, standing and picking up his backpack. “I get it. I need to redo the worksheet, and probably study some more before today’s quiz.”

“Maybe the luck will help you?” Ethel smiled sympathetically.

“I wish,” said Archie. “But the knack’s a lot better at multiple choice than short answers.”

He gathered his things, and just before he turned to go, he casually rested a hand on Betty’s shoulder. “Hey, Betts. Take some of that stuff Cheryl suggested if you need it – not for her, but for you. Hope you feel better soon.”

Jughead watched as a soft, surprised smile stretched across her face. “Thanks Arch,” she said quietly. “I’ll try.”

The next bite of lasagna tasted like it came fresh out of the kitchen of someone’s sweet old Italian grandmother, who insisted on making everything from scratch.

Jughead concentrated very hard on not melting his fork.

Sometimes luck meant being impossibly fortunate and not even realizing it.

 

 

 

The contretemps with Cheryl was the exception rather than the rule. Betty certainly received the occasional querying look in the Riverdale High lunchroom – and more than a few on the days that the cafeteria food served Tuna Surprise or burnt pizza. But on the whole, Betty’s classmates took her new knack in stride.

Part of the credit, she thought, was due to her friends, who helped to soothe any ruffled nerves and to keep her on the level. Sure, she like-liked him, but Archie also just seemed to exude a sense of good-humored well-being that was pretty contagious in its own right. And even on the days that Archie had to sit with the Bulldogs for mandatory team bonding, Betty still found that it was easy to get caught up in the wordplay and teasing between Midge and Kevin, or to playfully argue with Jughead about his interpretation of what they were reading in English, or even to ask Ethel questions about the latest page in her sketchbook.

These days, school and her friends felt like a refuge from home and her family.

 

When her parents had found out that Polly was dating Jason Blossom, the Cooper house had abruptly been plunged into warfare. Betty had always expected that her parents would be strict about boys, but her parents acted as if Jason was going to take Polly’s hand in his and personally lead her straight down the primrose path to hell.

For the better part of two months, Polly and their parents were at daggers drawn over Jason Blossom. It was a cycle: they forbade her to see him; Polly defied their wishes; her parents handed down increasingly harsh consequences; and Polly ignored them and continued to flout their commands. She was almost intentionally sloppy about it too, closing the front door hard when she was sneaking in after curfew, or telling an easily disprovable lie about where she would be that night. Betty sometimes wondered if Polly was trying to get caught, just to have the chance to rebel even harder.

Secretly, Betty herself couldn’t imagine what Polly was thinking. Objectively, she could admit that Jason Blossom was attractive – but both the Blossom twins had always been spoiled and cruel. Still, if Jason had decided that he liked Polly, that was one point in his favor; and surely time spent with her sweet sister could only help to improve his disposition.

Besides, the principle that the Cooper sisters always backed each other up was more important than the boy in question. So Betty listened patiently to Polly while she raged about their parents or recapped details of her latest secret rendezvous with Jason. She corroborated Polly’s alibis when she could and turned up her speakers to cover the noise of her sister sneaking out the window.

When Polly and Jason broke up for the first time, she held her sister while she cried incoherently, and tried to distract her mother when she started to gloat. Then Polly and Jason got back together; and when Polly recited dreamily to her all the reasons why he’d said they belonged together, Betty tried to distract _herself_ rather than bringing up the weeks that her sister just spent crying over the same boy.

Most of all, Betty tried particularly hard to make sure that nothing she did set her parents off even more.

In some families, Betty knew, when one sibling screwed up, the other sibling suddenly found themselves being praised and coddled. This was not the case in the Cooper household.

Betty couldn’t blame her sister for following her heart. But it didn’t seem quite fair that suddenly she found herself under her mother’s microscope as well – and without even the solace of a ginger-haired Prince Charming to make it all worthwhile.

Even before the Jason Blossom debacle, Betty had quickly learned that manifestations of her second knack could reliably irritate her mother. And so, when they sat down for Cooper family dinner, she tried to project nothing but calm neutrality, lest her mother pick up on an unexpected richness in the potatoes au gratin, or a bitter toughness in the greens that had been tender and fresh when they were brought to the table.

Betty often found herself testing each bite to see if it was the same as the last and to make sure that nothing seemed unusual. Some nights she realized that she’d cleaned her plate without actually feeling as if she’d eaten a full meal; other nights, she made herself so nervous that she pushed the plate away before she was half-done.

She discovered that concentrating on some sort of physical sensation helped her to manage her feelings. Balling her hands into fists seemed to work particularly well. Betty could focus then on the way the tendons in her wrist corded; on the pull of her skin over her knuckles, and on the sharp prick of nails digging into the meat of her palms – not too hard, but just enough to remind her to keep her emotions within the safe limits.

Sometimes it was a struggle. Once the good news about her summer internship in Los Angeles arrived, Betty realized that she had to avoid thinking about books, writing, the end of the school year, or the entire state of California while eating with her family, lest she inadvertently be responsible for the early demise of her mother’s new diet.

But despite the drama with her sister, despite her mother watching her like a hawk over the breakfast table every morning and the dinner table every night, she thought she was succeeding – until the evening that everything blew up.

 

It started when Polly reached for another dinner roll.

Alice set her own fork down with a sharp little click. It sounded remarkably like someone taking the safety off a loaded gun.

“Polly. Is that the wisest choice, dear?”

“Excuse me?”

“It’s getting warmer out, Polly, and you’re still wearing your bulky winter sweaters. I just want you to like the way you look in your Spring Fling dress at the end of the month.”

Betty watched as Polly flushed bone white and then a deep red. “Mother, you are absolutely unbelievable,” her sister hissed.

Alice sighed. “Polly, don’t be dramatic. I’m not trying to hurt your feelings. You’re so moody lately. If there’s something you want to talk about – if you’re still feeling sad about that awful Blossom boy – we’re happy to listen, darling. I know Betty makes it difficult, but you don’t need to channel those feelings into food.”

Polly slammed her hands down on the table and stood up.

“Yes, Mom. I have a major confession. I’m up one dress size. But what you haven’t noticed is that Betty’s clothes are hanging on her like she’s a scarecrow. You’ve made her so nervous that that she can’t even get through a full meal with us. Think about that, Mom. Her happiness makes everything taste delicious – and have you noticed that that’s hardly ever a problem for her here? She can’t even feel happy eating dinner with our family, like the perfect Norman Rockwell painting that you so _desperately_ want our lives to be, because you’re watching her all the time, trying to catch her out for the simple human sin of having feelings that you haven’t pre-approved.”

Polly was speeding up as she went, the words tumbling out of her like a tape recorder unspooling. Betty felt her own chest tightening in sympathetic panic.

“You are _so controlling_ , Mom – and Dad, you just fall right in line behind her, don’t you? You both think that nothing will go wrong, that everything will be perfect if Betty and I just follow this straight-arrow path that you’ve set out for us. You are so tense and so terrified that something – a B+ in chemistry class, a red lipstick, Jason Blossom, even another goddamned dinner roll – is going to somehow knock us off course, and that we’ll never recover.

But here’s the thing: neither of you realize that you and your plans are the problem. That _narrow goddamn path_ is the problem, because the moment that we do step off of it, we’re paralyzed with fear. We don’t know how to make our own decisions, because we’ve been watching you watch us for as long as we can remember, and we’ve been taking all our cues about right and wrong, or good and bad, from you.”

“That is enough, Polly!” Hal Cooper thundered.

His eldest daughter gave a bitter little laugh. “You’re right, Dad. Once is enough for Mom to remember, right? Even though I think I could say it again and again and I’m still not sure she would really get it.”

Polly’s tone softened as she saw the tears on her mother’s face. “Mom. I love you. But I don’t want to be you. And it’s time for me to make my own choices.”

And then, as if she was simply going to the kitchen to refill her glass of water, Polly walked out the front door.

Betty watched her leave; and then, once her sister was gone, she realized that she didn’t know where exactly it was safe to look. Watching her parents, as her father enfolded her mother in his arms and let her scream and cry into his chest, felt far too intimate, and so she murmured something and escaped to the safety of her bedroom.

 

 

Polly didn’t come back that night, or the night after that. She didn’t answer their calls or their texts, or Betty’s messages on WhatsApp.

For two days, everything Betty put in her mouth tasted like sawdust soaked in gasoline. At lunch, she found an excuse to eat in an empty classroom, and when Archie hesitantly asked her if everything was okay, she lied straight to his face for the first time ever.

(She didn’t think she had fooled him. She _knew_ she hadn’t fooled Jughead; she could feel his worried eyes on her in English class when he thought she wasn’t watching. But he didn’t press the issue, and she was grateful for it.)

On the third night, as she was sitting in the kitchen pretending to do her homework, straining to overhear her parents’ hushed argument about whether they should file a missing persons report, she heard Polly walk through the front door. Her parents’ conversation stopped short, as if someone had switched off the channel on which it was playing; and then an impossibly few number of words were exchanged between the three of them before Polly was passing by her, heading for the stairs.

“Pol?” she heard herself say softly, and her sister paused on the first step to look back at her. She looked exhausted and pale, but she gave Betty a tired little smile as she whispered, “Hi, Betts. We’ll talk about it then.”

But somehow they never did.

 

For weeks after Polly’s return, after the school year ended and the days began to stretch into summer, the Coopers were very tense and very polite with each other.

And Betty hated it; she hated the way that they were all pretending that everything was all right, but at the same time it was also better than her father yelling and her mother weeping and almost three full days and nights of heavy, empty silence from her sister’s bedroom down the hall.

So Betty counted down the days until she left for her internship, and in the meantime, she concentrated very hard on maintaining her control, on not allowing her emotions to escape and do something that might upset the fragile balance that existed in their house.

And the marks in her palms, little slices like those left by a fingernail sliding into the thin skin of a perfectly ripe tomato, seemed a small price to pay for that outward calm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Here is Nigella's recipe for Gateau Reine de Saba.](https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/6793-gateau-reine-de-saba) It tastes nothing like a Hostess cupcake.
> 
> Your explanation for Cheryl Blossom's familiarity with [turn-of-the-millennium flop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mystery_Men) _Mystery Men_ is as good as mine, but I couldn't resist the reference. 
> 
> The more proper name for the war that Kevin's referring to is the Seven Years War - but the joke doesn't work as well that way. Whatever you call it, [George Washington did play a major role in touching it off, though.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Jumonville_Glen)
> 
> Finally, I am incredibly touched by people's enthusiasm for this fic so far! Your comments, kudos, and [this amazingly beautiful piece of fanart by missmrah](https://missmrah.tumblr.com/post/163008645461/an-art-lawful-as-eating) warm my heart - no knacks needed. 
> 
> I'm a slow writer, so I'm sorry for the long wait between chapters, but I really do appreciate your comments, kudos, and questions so very much! And in the meantime, feel free to come say hi on Tumblr at village-skeptic.


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